Horton Hears a Who! (2008)

Horton Hears a Who! Synopsis

The makers of Ice Age, and comedy giants Jim Carrey and Steve Carell, bring to life Dr. Seuss beloved Horton Hear a Who. An imaginative elephant named Horton (Carrey) hears a faint cry for help coming from a tiny speck of dust floating through the air. Although Horton doesn't know it yet, that speck houses an entire city named Who-ville, inhabited by the microscopic Whos, led by the Mayor (Carell). Despite being ridiculed and threatened by his neighbors who think he has lost his mind, Horton is determined to save the particle...because "a person's a person no matter how small."

Hollywood has had it all wrong when it comes to Dr. Seuss. For the past few years they’ve been trying to shoehorn his imaginative, wonderfully weird, classic children’s books into a series of failed, live-action feature films. Finally though, they’ve come to their senses and found the right way to adapt Dr. Seuss: animation.

My favorite Seuss book has always been “Horton Hears a Who”, and now the book is being turned into a computer animated film with Jim Carrey as the voice of Horton. As a Seuss fan, I’m heartened by what I’ve seen from the look of the movie so far, though I’m not so sold on Carrey as the voice of Horton. Perhaps even more worrying, the trailer makes this thing look like a slapstick comedy where the greatness of Seuss’s original “Horton” book is that it’s a little bit sad and bittersweet as well. Seuss’s stories always have something important and sometimes serious to say along with all of the good Doctor’s wonderful weirdness, and I just hope that’s made it into this translation along with the wackiness.